Enlightenment Through Understanding

Ferguson is Not the Future of America

August 20, 2014

We need a stronger police presence in Ferguson, with more tear gas and stun grenades. If these hoodlums won’t cooperate, suppress them with overwhelming force. If that means more injuries and some deaths, too bad. The problem is, like the Treyvon Martin death, Obama is taking sides when normally the executive branch never gets involved in local disputes such as this, and not surprisingly, Obama is siding with ‘his people’, instead of the police.

To answer the question in the title, more like the past than the future. A small complaint with Patt’s articles, in general, is how he uses an event (Iraq war, Ferguson riots) to try to make a broad prediction about America that never comes true, or he shoots down his own thesis like in the last paragraph of his article where he writes:

Nevertheless, the violence in Ferguson is child’s play compared to Watts in ‘65, Newark and Detroit in ‘67, and 100 U.S. cities including Washington, D.C., after

Dr. King’s assassination in ‘68. In those riots, great cities were gutted, dozens were killed, and thousands arrested.

So what was the point of the article if he says at the end that this is not a big deal, which is true, but must suck for readers who were expecting more.

Fortunately, incidents of American civil unrest like Ferguson are so rare that they even get their own Wikipedia page. So, I hate to be the bearer of good news again, but no, Ferguson is not the future of America. If you are a survivalist, maybe you do want things to get worse so all that gear and training doesn’t go to waste. Many liberals and some on the ‘far-right’, in their seeking of crisis and destruction, want more uprisings and a ‘system reset’, yet they underestimate the unbreakability of the status quo and the complacency of people. The vast majority of Americans (99.9%) don’t want to riot and make noise and would rather be productive individuals. That’s one reason why in the past 100 years, America has been so successful and peaceful compared to the rest of the world. Another reason is that America puts a lot of people in jail, especially since the 80′s, which correlates with the precipitous drop in violent crime:

A final explanation for the reduction of crime is eugenic effect of birth control, a theory proposed by economist Steven Levitt that was met with much criticism by the left.

Patt never passes on the opportunity to call America an ‘empire in decline’, and yet every metric from record profits & earnings, to record high stock prices, to historically low treasury yields indicates that the the American ‘empire’, for all its flaws, is doing pretty well and is at no risk of collapsing. It’s like Patt sets readers up and then lets them down, not only by his own doing, but because his arguments are so weak and full of holes that one can’t help but to not take him seriously. In reality, Detroit is the only example of a city that never recovered, but LA and DC have done fine. Most of this article is just him stating what everyone already knows about Ferguson, which is that lots of black people are mad over some punk getting shot. Nothing special here, but then again, Patt has never written much of anything good, anyway, and that’s probably why he was on MSNBC, of all places.

As a caveat, due to the expansion and militarization of American police force combined with millions of people permanently dropping out of the labor force and living on the margins of society, we predict there will be more deadly police vs. civilian encounters, but these will remain isolated, small events.